Wretches Quotes

#1. There but for the grace of God,' said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, 'go I.' What this apparently compassionate observation really means--not that it really 'means' anything--is, 'There by the grace of God goes someone else.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. The worst of men generally have the words rogue and villain most in their mouths, as the lowest of all wretches are the aptest to cry out low in the pit.

Henry Fielding

#3. These poor wretches were stolen from their homes, carried to a strange country, and sold to servitude, from which they sought to escape on the first occasion which offered.

Philip Hone

#4. Some, I verily believe, delight to be slave-men; it is a joy to them, and they would not change their condition; not only miserable village wretches, but men in good position, well-to-do sycophants.

Richard Jefferies

#5. Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

William Shakespeare

#6. How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

Herman Melville

#7. As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#8. Oh Heaven! You sometimes bear with such injustice on earth, that I understand why there are wretches who doubt in your existence.

Alexandre Dumas

#9. For almost two years, the rain had been sparse, and grain was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Augusta did her best to purchase whatever grain was available and send it to her people, but the ungrateful wretches still complained.

Dima Zales

#10. Letters were first invented for consoling such solitary wretches as myself. Having lost the substantial pleasures of seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing.

Heloise

#11. Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors.

Plato

#12. God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. ("Mad House")

Richard Matheson

#13. Poor wretches that depend
On greatness' favor, dream as I have done;
Wake, and find nothing.

William Shakespeare

#14. Maria was not permitted to walk in the garden; but sometimes, from her window, she turned her eyes from the gloomy walls, in which she pined life away, on the poor wretches who strayed along the walks, and contemplated the most terrific of ruins - that of a human soul.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#15. When I started in the press there were really ink-stained wretches. Not everybody went to college. Now, everybody at the New York Times and the Washington Post and Salon and Slate, most of them have Ivy League educations.

Joe Klein

#16. War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others?

Ian M Banks

#17. For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.

James G. Frazer

#18. A foolish physician he is, and a most unfaithful friend, that will let a sick man die for fear of troubling him; and cruel wretches are we to our friends, that will rather suffer them to go quietly to hell, then we will anger them, or hazard our reputation with them.

Richard Baxter

#19. I, too, saw God through mud - The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

Wilfred Owen

#20. Maybe you all didn't notice,but when that hospital was about to crumble with all those innocent people inside, Thom was the only one who stopped the Wrecking Balls. The only finger I feel like pointing right now is my middle one, at all of you, bunch of ungrateful wretches, if you ask me.

Perry Moore

#21. The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

Alexander Pope

#22. O Life! thou art a galling load,
Along a rough, a weary road,
To wretches such as I!

Robert Burns

#23. Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

George Eliot

#24. Jews and papists are ungodly wretches; they are two stockings made of one piece of cloth.

Martin Luther

#25. Greatness and Truth can never be in danger from these murdering wretches. To perform one's duty, be it now, be it clean, and be it done with humility ... A man is a sacred thing. ANY ACTION OR THOUGHT WHICH INJURES THE HUMAN IMAGINATION IS EVIL.

Kenneth Patchen

#26. And be very careful at the front, Paul."
Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!

Erich Maria Remarque

#27. Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches.

Jesse Helms

#28. Excise: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

Samuel Johnson

#29. It was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. "It's nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry" he would say. "I've been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.

Halldor Laxness

#30. We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#31. But what is worse than all," observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, "these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other's testicles."31

Gordon S. Wood

#32. There are no greater wretches in the world than many of those whom people in general take to be happy.

Seneca The Younger